Matthew
19-09-2003, 05:33 PM
A visit to the Vietnam Documentary Studios in Hanoi
HANOI again! I didn't think I'd ever be back, but my friends at CARE and the Vietnam Television Film Company asked me back last month to help sort out yet more problems with their editing systems. On my day off, I went to have a look at some local film production facilities ...
Picked up at the Hotel by my guide and interpreter and drove with two others along the southern shore of the West Lake to the Vietnam Studio For Documentary And Scientific Film Production ... past bonsai shops selling manicured trees, twisted rootwood and craggy stones for ornament, stalls weighed with gaudy plastic buckets ... and a marble-white spitted pig stretched stiffly over fresh coals in a corrugated iron trough.
Met by the Studio Director and the tall, high cheekboned vice technical director. Sat under the fans in a small office with small cups of green tea and listened while I was greeted and told about the centre's hopes and ambitions.
Their raison d'être appears similar to that of Film Australia, to document the country and its people for the benefit of future generations ... but due to their reducing budgets they are now feeling the imperative to produce films that also make some financial return.
The centre is based in an area about the same size as Film Australia, large naples-yellow buildings with the omnipresent knee-high skirt of mossy damp, blue and white shuttered windows and concrete parapets. Tall large-leaved tropical trees drip moist shade over the massed motorbikes and the very few cars.
Visited the video editing area ... Large straight benches in larger clean cool rooms with aluminium windows. Geckos bark on the walls, and shoes off at the door. I envy the beautiful mahogany wardrobes in all the rooms ... for storing tapes!
One room is a Umatic/S-VHS editing suite, with simple Sony PVE500 machine controller.
Another 3-machine SP Betacam suite with PVW decks, a mixing desk and the same controller. A woman edits a 30 minute documentary tracing the lives of people born 25 years ago at the time of the 1972 bombing raids.
This film was a one-off documentary, with no presale anywhere yet. 7 hours of footage shot on SP, and 50 hours editing time allowed, strictly tape to tape. Camera sound is laid during editing onto one track of the master. Copy made of the master, then more sound and music and voice layed onto the two tracks which are then bumped back onto the second track on the master. (I remember cutting like this for news in 1983.)
Then a quick look at "Sammy's" - one glass doored room with a Sammy's sticker on the cupboard ... two men servicing a 35mm arriflex on a table, and boxes of lenses against the walls.
To the sound mixing theatre, used only for film documentaries. Tiled floor and woven rattan, tatami style, on the walls for soundproofing, giving off warm musty barn-like smells. A lonely Sonifex desk and even lonelier single dusty speaker box under the screen, barred from accidents with two black steel strips. Very definitely mono. Magnatechs in the back room ... didn't get to see the projector.
Up tiled steps to the lab ... large stainless Photomec film processor chugging away in the middle of a raised guttered platform in a warm balcony room. Processed colour neg chugging slowly onto a core at the end of the machine. Two women running the show from a wooden desk set with heavy steel rewinders, and their 10 y/o daughter playing around the back. This processor used only for documentary film unit stuff ... most feature films are processed in Bangkok for better quality. (Hong Kong and Singapore too expensive.)
Down a dark corridor and through a curtained doorway to the printer and grading rooms, where safelights dangle loosely from twisted wires and the chromed Czech contact printer shines proudly in the centre. I get a demo of its punched tape operation, and see the RGB vanes flicking open and closed inside.
A Bell and Howell optical printer sits broken and lonely in the next room, in need of spare parts.
Another building, and the film archive. Attended by two women sitting outside at a wooden bench on the verandah, the archive is an aladdin's cave scented with chemicals and paper, a cool room housing closely-packed stacks of rusting 35mm film cans dating back to the 60's as far as I could see, maybe earlier. I looked inside a 1970 and a 1983 can, the film inside wrapped in brown paper looked ok, not mouldy but I am told the dyes in the colour films are fading. The B&W footage is apparently holding up well, and the studio is currently looking for funding to help preserve this archive.
Visited a film editing room. Like stepping back into a strage timewarp. Tall, cool room painted dark green, with electricals running over the walls from ceramic insulators embedded in the render. In the middle, a CTM 35mm flatbed and a trimbin held together with string and old magstock ... trims coiled neatly in cans on the floor and hung in bins, and a woman - the assistant editor - sits to one side filing offcuts against a lightbox, and the director sitting back.
The editor was using a Catozzo tape splicer - loaded with a 20cent roll of sticky crumpled cellotape - and a bottle of meths to wipe off the gum. She cuts the whole feature film completely mute - lipread - sound and pace imagined until the locked-off finecut. On- and off-screen dialogue is added later with effects and music. I found this an unimaginable process, and asked why they didn't shoot at least a guide track. I was told that they didn't have crystal synched cameras.
The room had a strange zen quietness and calm, and smelt right. I wanted to stay longer but a mobile phone called us away.
I was taken to lunch in town at a large open-air restaurant by the slightly ponging West Lake, a good-luck wedding party filling most tables.
Faces wiped with scented towels, beerglasses clink with a "Chuc su kueh!" and peanuts and cashews to nibble.
We start with a small bowl of thick clear gingery chicken soup with hair-fine shreds of lemon leaf. Small catfish and turtles suck and plop in the lake by my elbow.
Then a dish of stirfried kidney with glossy chinese mushrooms, delicate transparent strips of tripe, baby corn and onion, and a plate of roasted chicken with onion and firm green chick peas, the lot served with the usual herby salad of mints and coriander, and my favourite side dish of coarse salt and pepper, chillies and lime. Rice - and rice again, then another dish of succulent crumbed fish balls, a lovely rich oily meat I recognise but cannot name.
My glass doesn't get the chance to be empty ... I have eaten my fill already - when a methylated flaming bowl of rich golden soup swimming with fresh tomatoes is presented, and egg-noodles and greens are cooked at table. Oh, my ... but I cannot decline the main course, despite my groaning stomach!
After tea and toothpicks I am taken back to hotel by my generous hosts ... then everybody vanishes, I presume for siesta after such a meal. So like a true englishman I stupidly head out to exhaust myself in the sticky midday sun, to wander the streets of Hanoi and ponder the mysteries of filmaking in Vietnam ... and to try to find a good excuse to return one day!
- Matthew Tucker
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 1998 Matthew Tucker
HANOI again! I didn't think I'd ever be back, but my friends at CARE and the Vietnam Television Film Company asked me back last month to help sort out yet more problems with their editing systems. On my day off, I went to have a look at some local film production facilities ...
Picked up at the Hotel by my guide and interpreter and drove with two others along the southern shore of the West Lake to the Vietnam Studio For Documentary And Scientific Film Production ... past bonsai shops selling manicured trees, twisted rootwood and craggy stones for ornament, stalls weighed with gaudy plastic buckets ... and a marble-white spitted pig stretched stiffly over fresh coals in a corrugated iron trough.
Met by the Studio Director and the tall, high cheekboned vice technical director. Sat under the fans in a small office with small cups of green tea and listened while I was greeted and told about the centre's hopes and ambitions.
Their raison d'être appears similar to that of Film Australia, to document the country and its people for the benefit of future generations ... but due to their reducing budgets they are now feeling the imperative to produce films that also make some financial return.
The centre is based in an area about the same size as Film Australia, large naples-yellow buildings with the omnipresent knee-high skirt of mossy damp, blue and white shuttered windows and concrete parapets. Tall large-leaved tropical trees drip moist shade over the massed motorbikes and the very few cars.
Visited the video editing area ... Large straight benches in larger clean cool rooms with aluminium windows. Geckos bark on the walls, and shoes off at the door. I envy the beautiful mahogany wardrobes in all the rooms ... for storing tapes!
One room is a Umatic/S-VHS editing suite, with simple Sony PVE500 machine controller.
Another 3-machine SP Betacam suite with PVW decks, a mixing desk and the same controller. A woman edits a 30 minute documentary tracing the lives of people born 25 years ago at the time of the 1972 bombing raids.
This film was a one-off documentary, with no presale anywhere yet. 7 hours of footage shot on SP, and 50 hours editing time allowed, strictly tape to tape. Camera sound is laid during editing onto one track of the master. Copy made of the master, then more sound and music and voice layed onto the two tracks which are then bumped back onto the second track on the master. (I remember cutting like this for news in 1983.)
Then a quick look at "Sammy's" - one glass doored room with a Sammy's sticker on the cupboard ... two men servicing a 35mm arriflex on a table, and boxes of lenses against the walls.
To the sound mixing theatre, used only for film documentaries. Tiled floor and woven rattan, tatami style, on the walls for soundproofing, giving off warm musty barn-like smells. A lonely Sonifex desk and even lonelier single dusty speaker box under the screen, barred from accidents with two black steel strips. Very definitely mono. Magnatechs in the back room ... didn't get to see the projector.
Up tiled steps to the lab ... large stainless Photomec film processor chugging away in the middle of a raised guttered platform in a warm balcony room. Processed colour neg chugging slowly onto a core at the end of the machine. Two women running the show from a wooden desk set with heavy steel rewinders, and their 10 y/o daughter playing around the back. This processor used only for documentary film unit stuff ... most feature films are processed in Bangkok for better quality. (Hong Kong and Singapore too expensive.)
Down a dark corridor and through a curtained doorway to the printer and grading rooms, where safelights dangle loosely from twisted wires and the chromed Czech contact printer shines proudly in the centre. I get a demo of its punched tape operation, and see the RGB vanes flicking open and closed inside.
A Bell and Howell optical printer sits broken and lonely in the next room, in need of spare parts.
Another building, and the film archive. Attended by two women sitting outside at a wooden bench on the verandah, the archive is an aladdin's cave scented with chemicals and paper, a cool room housing closely-packed stacks of rusting 35mm film cans dating back to the 60's as far as I could see, maybe earlier. I looked inside a 1970 and a 1983 can, the film inside wrapped in brown paper looked ok, not mouldy but I am told the dyes in the colour films are fading. The B&W footage is apparently holding up well, and the studio is currently looking for funding to help preserve this archive.
Visited a film editing room. Like stepping back into a strage timewarp. Tall, cool room painted dark green, with electricals running over the walls from ceramic insulators embedded in the render. In the middle, a CTM 35mm flatbed and a trimbin held together with string and old magstock ... trims coiled neatly in cans on the floor and hung in bins, and a woman - the assistant editor - sits to one side filing offcuts against a lightbox, and the director sitting back.
The editor was using a Catozzo tape splicer - loaded with a 20cent roll of sticky crumpled cellotape - and a bottle of meths to wipe off the gum. She cuts the whole feature film completely mute - lipread - sound and pace imagined until the locked-off finecut. On- and off-screen dialogue is added later with effects and music. I found this an unimaginable process, and asked why they didn't shoot at least a guide track. I was told that they didn't have crystal synched cameras.
The room had a strange zen quietness and calm, and smelt right. I wanted to stay longer but a mobile phone called us away.
I was taken to lunch in town at a large open-air restaurant by the slightly ponging West Lake, a good-luck wedding party filling most tables.
Faces wiped with scented towels, beerglasses clink with a "Chuc su kueh!" and peanuts and cashews to nibble.
We start with a small bowl of thick clear gingery chicken soup with hair-fine shreds of lemon leaf. Small catfish and turtles suck and plop in the lake by my elbow.
Then a dish of stirfried kidney with glossy chinese mushrooms, delicate transparent strips of tripe, baby corn and onion, and a plate of roasted chicken with onion and firm green chick peas, the lot served with the usual herby salad of mints and coriander, and my favourite side dish of coarse salt and pepper, chillies and lime. Rice - and rice again, then another dish of succulent crumbed fish balls, a lovely rich oily meat I recognise but cannot name.
My glass doesn't get the chance to be empty ... I have eaten my fill already - when a methylated flaming bowl of rich golden soup swimming with fresh tomatoes is presented, and egg-noodles and greens are cooked at table. Oh, my ... but I cannot decline the main course, despite my groaning stomach!
After tea and toothpicks I am taken back to hotel by my generous hosts ... then everybody vanishes, I presume for siesta after such a meal. So like a true englishman I stupidly head out to exhaust myself in the sticky midday sun, to wander the streets of Hanoi and ponder the mysteries of filmaking in Vietnam ... and to try to find a good excuse to return one day!
- Matthew Tucker
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 1998 Matthew Tucker